Developers Say These Are The Only Two Ways To Get In Touch With Facebook

We've spoken with a bunch of early and current developers on
Facebook and they say there are
pretty much only two ways to get in touch with the company:

Lurk in Facebook's IRC room, #Facebook.
Sometimes, you'll find Facebook employees hanging out in the
chat room dishing out advice. Most times, it's developers
commiserating about working on the Facebook platform.

Other than that, assistance is hard to come by.
Your best bet is to actually go to other Facebook developers,
like the ones in the #facebook chat room, with questions. They're
an extremely helpful bunch.

Early on, it was much more casual among developers — you could
reach very senior Facebook platform employees in the IRC chat
room. "Those days are pretty much done now," one developer said.

Some larger developers have access to email addresses of Facebook
Platform employees, but that's rare.

Your smartest bet is also to move cautiously and ensure
that you aren't violating Facebook's terms, because Facebook has
a very low tolerance for it.

One developer told us Facebook randomly turned his game off for
several days only to bring it back online a few days later. He
speculated it was related to Facebook's terms of service, but
didn't hear a sufficient reason.

But it's led to some confusion amongst developers. Most
developers will "shoot first, ask questions later," but this is a
policy that's going to put you at risk.

Developers were constantly pushing the boundaries back when the
Platform first came out, and there were "new use cases"
constantly emerging that were violating Facebook's terms,
according to a source close to the company.